Paper Airplanes

by Monica Alexander

  I looked at my dad whose eyes were shining. He looked weary. In fact, both of my parents looked drained. I glanced at Marley who looked just as bad. Then I saw her arm.

  “Why do you have a cast on?” I asked, my voice sounding weak and hoarse, like I hadn’t used it in weeks.

  She looked solemn as she filled my cup with more water and handed it to me. This time I could grip it in my hand. “I broke my wrist. I have to wear this for the next few weeks.”

  “What happened?” I asked after I’d drained the cup. I was so thirsty.

  Looking at her arm, I was so worried that something had happened to her, to both of us. Was it my fault?

  Tears filled her eyes again as she said. “Oh, my God. Do you seriously not remember?”

  I shook my head, panicked that something horrible had happened, and I had no recollection of it. Had she been in a car accident? Had I been driving?

  “Tell me,” I insisted.

  She shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  She was full-on crying again, shaking her head back and forth. My dad hugged her, and she fell into him. He’d been like a second father to her throughout her life, since her own father traveled so often for work. She’d practically lived at our house on the weekends while we were growing up and spent a good number of weekdays there too.

  My mother’s hand reached out and smoothed back my hair. “There was an incident,” she said softly, and I looked over at her.

  “What do you mean ‘an incident’?”

  I noticed she didn’t say accident. She’d said incident. What did that mean?

  Marley wouldn’t stop crying, so I reached for her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed it back.

  “I think we should let the doctors check you first,” my dad suggested, but that only made me mad.

  “Tell me what happened. Please,” I insisted, fearing the absolute worst.

  My dad shook his head.

  “I think we should tell her, Joel,” my mom said to him. “She’s going to find out eventually.”

  “Fine,” he said. “But I’m getting Dr. Rattigan.”

  “Who’s Dr. Rattigan?”

  “Your doctor,” my mother supplied.

  “Why do I have a doctor? Why am in the hospital?” I asked again since no one had supplied that information the first time I’d asked.

  Marley still wouldn’t stop crying. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she was gripping my hand like if she were to let it go I’d die.

  My mother looked pensive.

  “Someone tell me something!” I said as forcefully as I could, but I was weak, so it just came out half-hearted.

  My mother took a deep breath. She shook her head. “It’s all over the Internet,” she said, almost to herself. “So many stories, the coverage never seems to stop.”

  “What is all over the Internet? What coverage?” I asked, feeling like I couldn’t get a grip on reality.

  “The shooting,” Marley said around a sob.

  My blood started to run cold. “Shooting? What shooting? What are you talking about?”

  My mother nodded as her eyes filled with tears again. “Three weeks ago, there was a young man who was very troubled. He suffered from depression, and he wasn’t in his right mind. He – he somehow got a gun, and he went out looking for – well, no one really knows what he was looking for – but he went on a spree.”

  I blinked a few times trying to process what she was saying. As spree? A shooting spree? Had I somehow been involved in that? Had I been shot? Where the hell had I been that I’d been involved in a shooting spree?

  “Who was he?” I asked.

  “A student.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head.

  My mother drew in a shaky breath. “You and your friends had walked down to the dining hall on campus. The boy was already in there, and soon after you all entered, he started shooting. They’re still trying to figure out his motive, but he killed fourteen people and injured seventeen before he was killed.”

  “Did he shoot me?” I squeaked out, not able to process what she was saying.

  I’d seen school shootings on TV too many times to count. I remembered watching the coverage of what had happened at Virginia Tech and thinking to myself, what would I do if I was in that situation? How would I get away? Had that seriously happened at my school? To me? And worse, who had I been with? Why couldn’t I remember anything?

  I looked up and met Marley’s gaze, so many questions swimming in my head that I couldn’t keep them straight. Who was there? Was anyone hurt? What happened to her? What happened to me?

  “Yes, you were shot,” my mother confirmed as Marley started to cry harder and my heart stated to pound. “Not directly, though.”

  “What does that mean?” I squeaked out, looking at my mother.

  “We don’t know what happened for sure, but the police think that the boy you were with? Will? He saw the gunman first. He only had a split-second to react, before the gunman shot him twice – once in the arm and once in the head.”

  Tears suddenly filled my eyes as I comprehended everything she was saying. Will had been shot? Was he dead? Is that what she was telling me?

  No! No, no, no, noooooooo!

  I heard myself wailing, the noises coming out of my throat not making any sense, and it was as if they were involuntary. All I could think was, Not Will. Not my perfect, beautiful boyfriend, the boy I loved so much because he was special and sweet and wonderful. Not him. No!

  My hand reached for the paper airplane necklace he’d given me the first night we got together. I never took it off, and whenever I thought of Will, I found myself inadvertently playing with it, worrying it between my fingers. But it wasn’t there.

  “No,” I heard myself saying, and then I was shaking my head. “Not Will. No. Not Will.”

  I was grappling for my necklace, scraping my skin with my fingernails, panicking for so many reasons.

  “Where’s my necklace?” I demanded.

  My mother took my hand in hers, folding her fingers around mine as she guided my hand away from my throat. “I have it. The doctors gave it to me when you were admitted. It’s at the hotel we’re staying at. I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

  I felt tears prick my eyes. I wanted my necklace. I wanted Will. In that moment, I wanted so many things that I knew I couldn’t have. I looked up at Marley. She was crying.

  “Not Will,” I said softly, my face crumbling around the words, because even without her or my mother confirming what I was thinking, I knew he was dead.

  She reached out and hugged me. “He saved your life, Cass,” she said, and the world stopped spinning for a second as the tears spilled down my cheeks.

  I pulled back and looked at her, trying to process what she was saying. “What do you mean?”

  “Witnesses said that the guy fired his gun several times in quick succession when he initially stood up. He shot another student, and then he aimed at you and Will. Will saw it and turned, blocking it from hitting you. It ended up going through his arm and it grazed the side of your head, but second one–” Her breath hitched, and she shook her head as if she couldn’t say the words.

  “The second bullet killed him,” my mother said softly, and I felt more tears well up in my eyes again as the image of Will shielding me played over and over again in my mind.

  “I saw it, Cass,” Marley said then. “I turned, and I saw Will get shot. He fell on you. I thought you were dead too.”

  Not Will. No. Not Will.

  Will was only twenty-two. He had his whole life in front of him, and it had been taken? I couldn’t even make sense of that. No, he couldn’t be gone. He couldn’t be. No. I refused to believe it.

  “Who else was there?” I asked Marley softly, because I knew in my heart it wouldn’t have been just Will, Marley and me hanging out. It never was.

  Marley’s head dropped to my shoulder then, her tears soaking my hospital gown. “Aiden and Reese,” she said,
the words muffled against my chest.

  Fear sparked in me once again. “No,” I said, shaking my head, which only made her cry harder. “No!”

  Recollection sparked in me, and I knew exactly what day they were talking about. It had been snowing, we’d been drinking, and we’d gone out for food. I remembered Will taking my hand as we walked toward the lighted dining hall in the middle of campus. But that was all I remembered. Everything stopped the second we walked into the building. What had happened after that? Why couldn’t I remember?

  “Not Aiden,” I said, looking at Marley for confirmation.

  Her crumbling face told me everything. “He tried to save me. When the guy shot Will, Aiden pulled me behind the cash register. The cashier was huddled back there, so we stayed with him. But Aiden tried to look out to see if he could see Reese. I called out to him, because I didn’t want him to leave me, and the guy found us. Aiden went after him when he pointed the gun at me. I couldn’t stop screaming. I was so scared, and he told me to shut up or he’d kill me. Aiden went after him, and–”

  Marley couldn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t need to. I knew exactly what had happened. Instead of saying anything, I just pulled her to me and held her as she cried, both of us mourning the boy she’d loved and someone who’d been a good friend to me since the day I’d met him.

  “What happened to Reese?” I asked then, my voice muffled by her hair.

  I wasn’t sure I could handle hearing that Reese was dead too. In the span of five minutes I’d lost two people close to me. I couldn’t take hearing that I’d lost another.

  “He was shot in the chest, but he survived,” she said, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Then I started to put the pieces together in my mind of what had happened that night. Will. Aiden. Reese. He’d shot all three of them. He’d tried to shoot me, and he’d gone after Marley. I squeezed her tighter. I was so relieved that she was there, that she was alive, that I was alive. But my brain was so jumbled by the fact that I’d lost two of my friends. Why had the guy been there? Why had he shot at us? Who was he? Did he have some issue with us?

  “Why?” I asked, looking between Marley and my mother.

  My mother shook her head, sadness sweeping her features. “No one knows for sure, but when they searched the gunman’s dorm room, they found a lot of evidence that he’d been contemplating something like this for a while. I think you all just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. You didn’t know him.”

  Her voice cracked on the last words, so I reached out and took her hand, squeezing it in mine. Tears started to fall down her cheeks, and she looked away from me.

  “Mar?” I asked, turning to my best friend.

  She looked up at me, lifting her head so I could see her tear-stained cheeks and red, bloodshot eyes.

  “Did you get shot?”

  She started to cry again as she shook her head. “No. After he shot Aiden, he aimed the gun at me, and I knew that was it. I was going to die. But the cashier – he was just another student – he tackled the guy and knocked me out of the way. I broke my wrist when I fell, and then I blacked out. When I came to, the police were there. The gunman was dead, and so was the cashier. I found out later that they’d fought, and the gunman killed him. The police had snipers take out the gunman right after.”

  She shuttered as she remembered every detail, and for the first time I was glad I had no memories. The images she’d put in my head were bad enough. I couldn’t fathom what it was like to close your eyes and see the things she’d seen.

  All I could do was hug her again, pull her close to me and cry along with her. The reality of my situation was slowly sinking in. I’d been shot. I’d been unconscious for three weeks, in a coma, and two of my best friends were dead along with twelve other students. Seventeen others had been injured, including Reese.

  This was not happening. This was not my life. This wasn’t real.

  Three Months Later

  Chapter Three

  Cassie

  “Cass?” my mom asked when she poked her head into my room.

  “Yeah, Mom?”

  I looked up from the book I was reading and met her gaze.

  She sat down on the end of my bed. “How are you feeling?”

  She’d asked me that every day since I’d moved home. And each day, I gave her some variation of the same answer. I said I was fine because it was the easiest thing to say. And it seemed logical since I still couldn’t remember anything about the shooting, even though I’d watched countless interviews with witnesses and the students who’d survived and read the articles about what had happened. I had no recollection of anything that had happened in the dining hall that night.

  I couldn’t believe I’d been there, that I’d witnessed it, and that I’d survived it. It didn’t seem real. It was like watching a news story unfold, except in this story, I not only knew people who were involved, I’d also been involved. It was a surreal feeling of being on the outside looking in but not really. A part of me had shifted after than night. I felt different, but I couldn’t explain why that was. It was almost as if my body knew it should feel different, but my brain couldn’t wrap around why that was.

  “I’m good, Mom,” I told my mother, but I knew she didn’t believe me.

  I wasn’t good, and we both knew that. I was just okay. I was getting by as best I could, because despite what I didn’t remember, I had been through something traumatic and my brain knew it. I just couldn’t connect what I was feeling with what I remembered. It was incredibly frustrating.

  But aside from that, what resonated with me the most, what made me sadder than I’d ever felt was the reminder that I’d lost two people I loved. That hurt the worst, waking up each day knowing that Will and Aiden were gone, that they’d sacrificed themselves for me and Marley, and they were dead because of it.

  I was so torn inside feeling grateful at the same time I felt angry that Will did that. Why had he saved me? He was dead, and I had lived, and it wasn’t fair. Not that I wanted to be dead, but why him? Why did he have to die at all?

  God, I missed him. I missed him and Aiden every day. I hadn’t been able to go to either of their funerals. They’d been held while I was in the hospital, and I’d missed the memorial the students had held on campus a few days after the shooting. I’d lost almost a month of my life, and I’d woken up feeling like a different person.

  Maybe it was simply knowing what had happened to me, or maybe it was the fact that my friends had been gunned down so brutally for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, but I knew my life was never going to be the same. None of it made sense. Will was a nice guy. Everyone liked him. And Aiden was the comedian of the frat. Neither of them deserved to have their lives ended like they had.

  And the twelve other students who’d been killed, they didn’t deserve it either. All I kept thinking as I stayed in my room at my parents’ house and avoided the outside world as much as I could was how unfair it all was. I knew that was a childish way to think, but it was what kept running through my head. It was all so unfair.

  I’d been home for three months after getting released from the hospital a week after I’d woken up. The doctors had examined me and determined there wasn’t anything physically wrong with me. There wasn’t any medical reason for why I’d been in a coma for three weeks, and the only explanation they offered about my amnesia was trauma. I’d been traumatized – emotionally. Physically I was fine. The bullet that had hit me had grazed my scalp along the side of my head, tearing open part of my skull, but it hadn’t entered my brain. A few inches to the left, and I would have been dead.

  I’d had stitches, but by the time I’d woken up they had been removed, and my wound was healed. There was a scar I could feel along the side of my head that was several inches long, and I had a patch of hair that was just a few inches long growing from the spot of my injury where they had to shave my hair. You couldn’t tell when you looked at me, but I knew it was there
, and I had developed a bad habit of touching it, feeling the raised ridge and the short curls of hair. But that was my only physical reminder of the day.

  After getting out of the hospital, it had taken me a while to get my strength back, but for me that was a convenient excuse not to do much of anything once I was home. In truth I was afraid. The fear I felt was intrinsic, never leaving, always inside me, and because of that, I stayed home a lot, hanging out in my childhood bedroom, reading to pass the time and watching movies that would make me laugh. I also talked to Marley daily. And I’d talked to Reese a few times. We’d never been all that close, but going through what we had changed that, and I knew we’d be bonded for life. Reese and Marley were bonded too. I knew they spoke more often than Reese and I did, talking about Aiden and what had happened, finding comfort in each other. It was really all any of us could do.

  I was glad Marley had him to talk to, since he remembered everything. He’d seen his brother go after the gunman, and he’d seen him fall, just like Marley had. I knew I couldn’t help Marley like he could, but I tried. She was home in Seattle, and I just wished she was with me. We needed each other, but her parents had insisted she come home. After the shooting, she’d tried to go to classes and resume her normal life, but it had been too hard. She couldn’t do it. But she refused to leave Wisconsin until she knew I was okay. Then after I was released from the hospital and my parents brought me home to Illinois, she went home too.

  I wished she could have come home with me. If she was there I knew she’d bring me a level of comfort I’d been missing since we’d been separated, and I’d do the same for her. She was like my sister, and I needed her more than ever. I needed someone. I’d never felt so alone, but Marley was the only person I felt like letting in. She was the only person who knew how I felt, how scared I was and how out of control my life had become in a short amount of time. She just got it.

  She’d been my best friend since kindergarten. We had grown up together, but right before high school her family had moved when her father got transferred for his job. But we’d kept in touch, always best friends, and we’d decided to go to the same college. We’d even taken a road trip to Coleman when we decided we wanted to go there. It was our first time being away from home alone, and we’d felt so free. The campus had been incredible, and we’d met two cute guys when we were grabbing lunch. It was a no-brainer. We left knowing that’s where we’d wanted to go to school.